Saturday Review: “In a Beautiful but Fallen World” a review by James Kirkland of J.S. Absher’s Skating Rough Ground (2022) poetry collection in NCLR Online Winter 2025
Kirkland reviews Absher’s latest poetry collection, giving wonderful summaries and background information. Kirkland believes the poems “differ widely in form and content,” yet when taken all at once they, “offer eloquent testimony to the poet’s powers as an observer and interpreter of the natural world.”
Kirkland then proceeds to analyze the various poems interspersed throughout the book with line and context call-outs. He says, “Interspersed with these illuminating moments of sensory experience are passages that invite deeper contemplation of the ways in which language – especially figurative language – can transform words, objects, and experiences into moments of revelation.”
Kirkland relates, “Taken together, these poems bring the book to a close on the same hopeful note sounded in earlier poems such as “Ballade of the Top” and “The Conversation of Matter,” reminding us that “joy and pain, deliberately blurred, / revolve on one axis, not spheres apart, / spinning together through the world.” Absher is well-known to NCLR readers as a multiple-finalist in our Applewhite Poetry Prize contest and his latest collection is well-suited to such a prolific poet.
Read the entire review in the NCLR Online Winter 2025 issue. To order: Skating Rough Ground
